Authors: Tamara Sztyma, Jeffrey Shandler, Joanna Andrysiak

Editor: Magdalena Prokopowicz

Pages: 62

Publisher: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews

"Letters to Afar – catalogue of the exhibition" organised by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in cooperation with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York (18 May– 30 September 2013).

The multimedia installation by the Hungarian artist Péter Forgács, accompanied by the music composed by the New York band The Klezmatics, was created on the basis of the YIVO collection of amateur recordings filmed by Jewish immigrants to the US as they visited their hometowns back in Poland.

They recorded the images of towns and villages as well as the scenes from the everyday life of the local Jewish communities with the aim of showing the resulting films to their families and members of their hometown societies back in the United States. Péter Forgács and The Klezmatics have forwarded those visual postcards to the contemporary viewers, separated from the world portrayed in these films not by the broad expanse of the ocean, but by the yawning gulf of 70 years.